There’s plenty of discourse around why just strength training and bodybuilding aren’t optimal physical activities for a person with non-specific goals. Maybe you should do crossfit because it tests a lot of things, or you should run because it’s easy to start and you can do it anywhere, or you should swim because it’s very low impact therefore easier if you’re overweight or older, etc. For many, their experience, consisting of childhood sports or school physical education, is mostly bad and totally uninformative for someone who wants to get better at physical things.1
What Lifting Offers
Simplicity
Simple bodybuilding or strength training is great, especially for a beginner who is interested in improving at something, being relatively systematic about it because you have few variables to change, and you can easily measure progress.2 The minimal widely recommended and very effective routine is to do just four lifts throughout the week: squat, bench press, deadlift, and overhead press. Then you just pick some rep and set scheme and you’re good. Pick a starting weight and add weight each time. Getting more advanced means just picking different amounts of time after which you add weight, changing how much weight you add when, and changing your rep and set scheme.
Applied Kinesiology
Lifting also readily enables you to learn more about your body. Simplest of all is learning about what movements engage which muscles. Considering you probably move your body a lot and you occasionally move other things with your body, then you have lots of opportunities in everyday life to use what you learned! When you learn this, you can easily take a different kind of movement and learn how to use strength training to get better at that other movement. For example, if you’re a novice climber but an intermediate lifter, you know how you can supplement climbing with back, bicep, and grip training, or if you like to lift and climb, you know that the climbing probably works your back and biceps enough that on lifting days, you can focus on the antagonist muscle groups.
Learning the Meta-Skill of Improvement
For some (me) the idea of starting from a base and progressively doing slightly more difficult things to get better at something wasn’t entirely new. When I played a lot of Starcraft 2, common advice for new players trying to get better was to reduce the number of choices you had to make in a game and focus on a few things at a time. For example, if you played terran, you could say you’re just going one build order and one unit composition, say, mass marines and your focus would be to just keep using your resources so they’re low and just attack when you can. The concept of a control variable is usually taught in school but in the context of experimentation. But showing that it can be applied to learning itself is simple but extremely effective! A lot of people forget about this!
The Rest
This includes sleep, stress, diet, and all the physiology involved are easy rabbit holes to fall down via the lifting entrance.
Notes
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Most children’s sports coaching sucks. From my experience in 8 years of martial arts and 14 years of coached swimming, most coaching (in these and miscellaneous school physical education activities) focuses around correcting technique to some degree and then some non-specific cardio. Even in relatively serious groups interested in competing, I don’t remember any discussion around systematic programming. The closest you would get is recording your personal record times for certain events between swim meets. Importantly, there no little discussion or education about how to get better. There were a few reasons why I didn’t like sports as a kid and into my teens, but since I like lifting and want to do more physical activities now. I think what I like (in addition to just enjoying pursuing the activities and people calling me big) is that I can easily measure progress ↩︎
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- Team sports suck because you need a lot of other people, so your options are limited. Measuring your own performance is hard because other people can themselves get better or worse. The composition of people may change, and there are a ton of variables about how a game may go.
- Adversarial sports suck because you need at least one other person, often many. You might adapt to a particular strategy or style if your pool of opponents is small, which is likely for physical sports in a particular location. Adversarial video games don’t have these problems and can be very good in terms of improving and tracking improvement despite more variables, see Starcraft 2 or online chess. There’s a robust elo system to match you against opponents of a good range of skill levels, it’s easy to find games, you can get many different opponents so you don’t overfit on a style or strategy, and burnout/stress is less of a physical process so you can just practice more.
- Climbing is bad because there are a lot of weird variables: the grips and routes are highly varied and less in your control.
- Crossfit is bad because it’s way too varied and what it wants you to do aren’t good learning tools.
- Olympic lifting is bad because it’s weird and too technique driven.
- Strongman is bad because it’s too varied, hard to find, and progression can be weird.